USC, IBM and the LA Times Team Up to Determine ‘The People’s Oscar’ Winner

Hate how Best Picture at the Academy Awards often goes to films that are in no way, shape or form the best movie of the year? Well, there may be some solace for you if your film of choice gets jobbed. USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab has teamed with IBM and the LA Times to measure social media buzz relating to this year’s Oscars. Culling worldwide Twitter sentiment, the hope is to accurately identify the “people’s Oscar” winners in the major categories.

From the release:

The project relies on new sophisticated analytics and natural language recognition technologies to gauge positive and negative opinions shared in millions of public tweets.

Focused on the Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Picture categories, the goal is to establish a model for measuring the volume and tone of worldwide Twitter sentiment to better understand moviegoers’ opinions. The results are intended to illuminate how advances in technology can help identify important consumer trends.

The real time results are harvested by something called a Senti-meter, which you can check out here. Looks like a lot of Hugo and Harry Potter action currently underway. Someone also just called Glenn Close “sexy” in her role as a man, Albert Nobbs.